Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

by Chuck Klosterman

  I think I would. I mean, I still watch The Apprentice.

  And this, I suppose, would be Mr. Garfield’s chaos: a fuzzy world where commercials do not exist, yet everything is a commercial (all the time). And its only alternative would be no TV, which means we’d have no public awareness of Tide or Dial or Citrus Splash Scope.

  I can’t wait for 2010.

  Also, please buy my new magic food pill. It’s terrific.

  —Esquire, 2006

  Q: While traveling on business, your spouse (whom you love) is involved in a plane crash over the Pacific Ocean. It is assumed that everyone onboard has died. For the next seven months, you quietly mourn. But then the unbelievable happens: it turns out your spouse has survived. He/She managed to swim to a desert island, where he/she lived in relative comfort with one other survivor (they miraculously located most of the aircraft’s supplies on the beach, and the island itself was filled with ample food sources). Against all odds, they have just been discovered by a Fijian fishing boat.

  The two survivors return home via helicopter, greeted by the public as media sensations. Immediately upon their arrival, there is an international press conference. And during this press conference, you cannot help but notice how sexy the other survivor is; physically, he/she perfectly embodies the type of person your mate is normally attracted to. Moreover, the intensity of the event has clearly galvanized a relationship between the two crash victims: they spend most of the interview explaining how they could not have survived without the other person’s presence. They explain how they passed the time by telling anecdotes from their respective lives, and both admit to having virtually given up on the possibility for rescue. At the end of the press conference, the two survivors share a tearful good-bye hug. It's extremely emotional.

  After the press conference, you are finally reunited with your spouse. He/She embraces you warmly and kisses you deeply.

  How long do you wait before asking if he/she was ever unfaithful to you on this island? Do you never ask? And if your mate’s answer is “yes,” would that (under these specific circumstances) be acceptable?

  4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

  Because I’ve written about reality television on numerous occasions during the past ten years, I am often asked questions about it. Roughly 90 percent of these queries are different versions of the same question: “When will all of this be over?” There seems to be a universally held belief that reality television is a doomed fad, and that the genre has oversaturated the marketplace to an almost unfathomable degree, and that it is only a matter of moments before it all goes away. Everyone also seems to agree that reality programming is becoming more and more scripted, which means we are usually just watching contrived scenarios performed by untrained actors. Moreover, everything else on TV seems to be getting better; televised dramas have never been as complex or engrossing as they are right now. So when you consider how many people hate reality television (and how watchable its unreal competition has become), it’s hard to fathom why slow-paced, quasi-authentic, semi-humiliating game shows can still survive as mainstream entertainment.

  And yet they do. And they’re still popular, and they’re still being created, and they’re still prompting ostensibly intelligent people to ask questions such as, “I wonder what kind of world Supernova will sonically inhabit?” Clearly, this genre is more tenacious than logic would dictate. If you’re one of those people still asking “When will all of this be over?” you’re obsessing over the wrong question. The more compelling issue is why people still care about reality TV, especially when there are so many fictional alternatives that are so obviously superior. The easy answer would be to say that this is because most people are stupid, but that conclusion is reductionist, condescending, and wrong; unfortunately, the correct answer is even more depressing. And that explanation is best illustrated through a key ideological difference between Survivor and Lost.

  Superficially, Survivor and Lost have a lot in common: both depict disparate groups of people trying to exist on a deserted island while learning how to exist with one another. Lost is probably the best network drama in the history of television1 (the only other candidate might be Twin Peaks). The standards and practices of ABC prevent Lost from being as realistic or deep2 as an HBO series (it’s not as vulgar or intense as The Sopranos or as morally incendiary as Six Feet Under), but the writing is sophisticated and weirdly creative; one of the narrative threads during the first season is loosely based on an alternative universe where Oasis broke up after (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?3 It’s impossible to predict the arc of the Lost narrative, or even to guess how long that arc will last. Conversely, Survivor is static; the program is now entering its thirteenth season, and all of the previous twelve have been slightly different species of the same animal. Its cast members have been ingrained with the history and language of the show, and they all take their strategic cues from prior seasons. Survivor should not be able to compete with a program like Lost, which is better in almost every conceivable way. But it does. And that’s because Survivor has an advantage that Lost could never construct: Survivor—like most reality programming—is powered by the overwhelming significance of jealousy in everyday life. Which is why it still feels real to people, even when they know it mostly isn’t.

  At its core, Lost is an adventure story of the classical variety, which is to say it centers on the notion of The Great Man. The main character is a workaholic doctor (Matthew Fox’s Jack Shepherd) who’s expected to take care of everyone else, regardless of what the problem is; we slowly learn that his only weakness is overcommitment. The doctor’s ally/nemesis is a wise old man (Terry O’Quinn’s John Locke) who can slay boars with knives and read people’s minds; upon crashing onto the island’s sand, this unassuming cripple becomes the spiritualist equivalent of Nietzsche’s superman. Both of these characters are admirable. On Lost, greatness is everything4—and that makes the show likable. But it also reminds people that Lost is fake, and it suggests that the story will rarely show them glimpses of their own life (which, ultimately, is art’s main function). The wholly constructed world of Lost is how life should be, but isn’t. Meanwhile, the semi-constructed world of Survivor mirrors the way life actually is: every season, the mediocre majority unifies to destroy the unrivaled. After that, it becomes a popularity contest based on lying.

  If Dr. Jack and Mr. Locke were characters on Survivor, neither would have any chance of winning. On Survivor, being a successful leader is akin to a death sentence; with the exceptions of Ethan Zohn from Season 3 and Tom Westman from Season 10, the strongest players always lose.5 The game is actively designed to penalize greatness. The perfect Survivor contestant is the kind of paradoxical individual who should not exist: an understated, noncontroversial, virtually invisible person who—for some unknown reason—really, really wants to be on TV. Most importantly, the perfect Survivor contestant needs to be “un-great.” That is the key to winning $1 million. And from a programming perspective, that’s also why audiences will always relate to reality vehicles like Survivor, even when its tangible content seems dull and artificial.

  Lost is high-minded and confusing, which makes it entertaining. Survivor is unavoidably immoral, which makes it more prescient. The American world view is predicated (and measured) by individual success—but success can’t happen to everyone. Greatness is generally not shared. As a result, people are increasingly comfortable with the concept of equalizing the playing field through collusion and resentment. This is why JV basketball players sit on the bench and pray for members of the varsity to tear their ACLs. This is why the only sector of media that seems to be thriving is the coverage of celebrity gossip, an industry flooded with failed sycophants who couldn’t get jobs in real journalism. This is why choosing to position himself as un-great on purpose helped a man win the presidential election in 2000 and 2004. And this is why Survivor still has a place in society: it validates the practice of getting to the top by dragging everyone else to the middle.

>   Certainly, not all reality shows are based on this kind of philosophical nihilism; Bravo’s Project Runway consistently rewards genuine talent, and MTV’s anachronistic The Real World still (somewhat curiously) has no objective beyond getting cast on the show itself. There are also tangential elements of Survivor that make it specifically unique (for some reason, it’s always interesting to watch strangers starve for nonaesthetic motivations). But its disenchanting sociology is the core explanation as to why reality TV does not disappear. Its dialogue might seem coached and its action might seem staged, but the characters’ motives inevitably strike audiences as sadly plausible. Lost is awesome, but only as long as the storyline remains intense; the moment it gets boring,6 no one will care. All of its Great Men will suddenly seem like improbable caricatures. But Survivor doesn’t have to be interesting in order to be important. All it needs to show is the mendacity of the desperately average, and we will always understand why it is real.

  —Esquire, 2006

  1. I regret writing this sentence. However, this is not because I retrospectively disagree with my opinion after seeing Lost’s third season; it’s because this single sentence seemed to be the only thing many readers were able to remember about the entire column. Within the context of the piece, it does not matter if Lost is the best show of all-time or the thirty-eighth best show of the twenty-first century. My personal opinion about the program’s entertainment value is completely unrelated to the larger point of the essay. Unfortunately, I failed to realize that most people would rather argue over the superficial merits of what they like (or dislike) than consider why they unconsciously like (or dislike) anything.

  2. Chiefly, it is difficult to imagine how crash landing on a tropical island filled with polar bears and mystical smoke monsters would not prompt somebody to occasionally ask, “What the fuck is going on here?”

  3. Although in this universe (a) they are called Drive Shaft, (b) Liam is the older brother, (c) the group’s biggest song sounds more “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” than “Wonderwall,” and (d) Noel is named Charlie, plays bass, and is not cool.

  4. Further proof of this can be seen during the second season of Lost, when the expanded cast added a “Great Crazy Woman” (Michelle Rodriguez) and a “Great Nigerian Stoic” (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

  5. Interestingly, the 2006 “Race War” edition of Survivor (which the publication of this column directly preceded) may have proved me wrong on this point. The thirteenth season of the series was dominated by two contestants (Yul Kwon and Ozzy Lusth) who were both incredibly skilled and (mostly) honest and forthright. Yul ended up winning the $1 million on a 5–4 jury vote; it was probably the show’s best season since the year 2000. Is this good news for America? Perhaps. Probably not, but perhaps.

  6. Which is a risk every time an episode dwells on golf, the baby, or women Hurley is attracted to who don’t listen to the Hold Steady.

  Q: The world is ending. It’s ending quickly, and it’s ending dramatically.

  It will either end at noon on your fiftieth birthday, or it will end two days after you die (from natural causes) at the age of seventy-five.

  Which apocalyptic scenario do you prefer?

  TELEVISION

  Those who fail to understand the past are doomed to repeat it. However, what if that’s your goal? What if that’s exactly what you want out of life? What if repeating the past—and then repeating it again and again—is the only thing that makes you happy?

  If this is indeed the case, you should do what I did: watch VH1 Classic for twenty-four consecutive hours. Nothing wages war with insomnia like wall-to-wall videos from the Reagan era. More important, there is much that can be learned from such an experience. It’s kind of like what Matthew McConaughey said in Dazed and Confused: “I get older, they stay the same age.” Now, I realize he was talking about high-school girls and I’m referring to Duran Duran videos. But what’s really the difference?

  12:02 P.M.: The afternoon begins with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star,” which is one of those videos where the band just performs a song live and we’re supposed to like it. If I were a DJ, this would be a snarky song to play immediately following “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” by Oasis. Tom is wearing a sports coat featuring the planets of the solar system (Saturn most prominently) and he’s smiling constantly; I guess he likes his job. This is followed by a clip from an unsmiling Roger Waters, who sings about beautiful women walking their dogs on the Sunset Strip. I sense this shall be a day of paradoxes.

  12:23 P.M.: “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” is currently on my twenty-one-inch life window, and the Police are dancing around the recording studio like a trio of nappyhaired gnomes. Everyone remembers that the Police wrote a bunch of great songs, but does anyone remember how often they wore stupid hats? Perhaps that was the style of the time. I can totally understand why Stewart Copeland always wanted to punch Sting in the throat. Up next is Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth.” Obviously, the guys in Duran II don’t wear hats because they’re “New Romantic–Looking.” As a consequence, one of the Andys in this band is dressed like a gay pirate and appears to be sporting my sister’s least successful haircut from the spring of 1986.

  12:57 P.M.: Okay, so now we’re into the hyper-trippy “All Right Now” by Free, and it’s raising a few questions. Logically, there is no way that everyone in the 1970s was a drug addict; that just couldn’t have been the case. However, this Free footage was clearly made exclusively for people who were completely high. Does this mean that the normal mind-set of mainstream culture in 1970 was akin to the way stoned people view the world in 2003? I mean, maybe even straight people thought they were stoned in the 1970s; maybe that’s how everyone felt, all the time. This might explain how Jimmy Carter got elected; it also might explain why his presidency was tainted by an attack from a giant swimming rabbit. Music can teach us many things.

  1:16 P.M.: We’ve moved into the “all-request hour.” Someone has requested Franke and the Knockouts’ “Sweetheart,” which is a song I never even knew existed. I like to imagine that some unemployed slacker is sitting in his double-wide trailer in the middle of the afternoon, and he’s thinking, Ah, yes. All my hard work has finally paid off. At long last, Franke and the Knockouts are back in the public consciousness. And I would wager $10,000 that this person is named Franke.

  1:24 P.M.: “Dust in the Wind,” my all-time favorite song about dirt and air, is pulling at my heartstrings while the bearded fellows in Kansas pull at their violin strings. You know, nobody makes truly sad songs anymore. Outside my bedroom window, some city employees are tearing up the sidewalk with jackhammers and playing the new 50 Cent record on a boom box; from what I can deduce, the first four tracks are about killing people and the fifth is about drinking Bacardi. Now, I realize 50 is reflecting the reality of the streets and the frailty of human existence, but didn’t Kansas already do that? Nothing lasts forever, except the earth and sky. I should have become a farmer.

  1:52 P.M.: Lindsey Buckingham is trapped in a fish tank and killing his doppelganger with mind bullets. Part of me is tempted to suggest that this low-fi technology and guileless chutzpah is cool and/or Advanced and/or better than videos of the modern age, but I just can’t do it. This is pretty idiotic. No wonder Stevie Nicks had to do all that blow. I’m sure she saw this video in 1982 and thought to herself, I used to share my shawl with that guy?

  2:05 P.M.: There may be better guitar riffs than the opening of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” but there can’t be more than five. The singer’s hat sure is stupid, though. I wish Stewart Copeland would punch him in the throat.

  2:09 P.M.: I’m watching film footage of Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic,” and it’s one of those montages where we see old scenes of traffic and frigid homeless people and crazy dudes in wheelchairs, and this is supposed to replicate the experience of traveling across Manhattan in 1968. However, I remain certain that this song must be a metaphor for a stubborn wom
an Hendrix was trying to sleep with, because there is no way Jimi Hendrix would ever be bothered by gridlock. I can’t fathom a scenario where Jimi would have needed to be on time, unless he was late for a taping of The Dick Cavett Show.

  2:25 P.M.: One of my all-time favorite video tropes is the “Spontaneous Sex Party in the Classroom” conceit, best personified by Van Halen in “Hot for Teacher” but also exemplified by what I’m watching right now, which is “Sexy + 17” by the Stray Cats. Sadly, the girls in this video don’t look seventeen. This is more like the last few seasons of Happy Days, where a thirty-six-year-old Fonzie would snap his fingers and be groped by two high-school cheerleaders, both of whom were roughly thirty-three.

  2:29 P.M.: Speaking of Van Halen, “Sexy + 17” is followed by “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” which is a narrative about a semi-hot woman being sexually tortured by two dwarves, only to be rescued by a cowboy (Eddie Van Halen), a jungle savage (Alex Van Halen), a Samurai warrior (Michael Anthony), and Napoleon Bonaparte (David Lee Roth). This was released in 1982, so I guess this was Van Halen’s Village People period.

  2:35 P.M.: Things are really getting excellent: Poison’s “Fallen Angel” is illustrating the cautionary tale of a small-town girl who moves to Los Angeles and immediately becomes a whore. The moral of our story? Never go anywhere and never try anything. Stay home and buy more Poison records.